Take Me has all the ingredients in place for an enjoyable erotic novel featuring a plus sized heroine. Lily Ellis is beautiful and realistic as well. She’s a size 16 with cellulite. Travis Carson is rich, handsome, has a great body, and would win multiple gold medals in a sex Olympics. During the course of the book, Lily and Travis travel to Tuscany and have sex all over the countryside, as well as scorching the sheets/pool/tub/dance floor here in the USA.

Beautiful heroine, handsome hero, exotic setting and great sex. Sound good? Well, I thought so but was quickly disillusioned. Call me old-school but lots of sex scenes in exotic places do not a good book make..when the characters are silly and unlikable. I actively disliked Lily, was indifferent to Travis, and with the exception of the sex scenes, the writing was pedestrian. I finished this book in a bad mood.

When dress designer Janica Ellis’s plus sized model gets ill before the big show, Janica begs her beautiful plus sized sister Lily to take the model’s place. Lily is a size sixteen and uncomfortable about it, but she doesn’t want to let Janica down. Lily agrees to model only if her best buddy Luke Carson will come over, sit in the audience and lend her his support. Luke, a doctor, can’t get off work and so he begs his twin brother Travis to take his place. Luke is the good twin who has always been Lily’s best friend and champion. Travis is the bad twin who has sneered at Lily for years, but he agrees to go and be nice to her.

Lily gets a big buildup, and fueled by several glasses of champagne, comes out on the catwalk oozing confidence and sex appeal. When he sees her in The Dress, Travis is struck by a thunderbolt. Can this goddess be the mousy Lily he has teased for so long? In an instant, Travis’s erotic tastes are changed forever. Bye-bye Paris Hilton – hello Kirstie Alley.

After the show while the champagne is still bubbling in her system, Lily dances with Travis (whom she has lusted after for years) and has an orgasm on the dance floor. They repair to his apartment where they have a couple of bouts of hot, steamy sex but after Lily sobers up, all her insecurities come to the surface. She leaves before Travis can wake up and see her imperfections.

But Travis is a man in love – or at least in lust. He tracks Lily down and offers her a job decorating a house for one of his clients (Travis is an architect). The house just screams for authentic European furniture so Travis and Lily are off to sunny romantic Tuscany where Lily is feted as the bella signora. Seeing Lily bloom in Italy, Travis realizes he loves her and always has. But despite all of Travis’s protestations of love, Lily remains insecure.

And that was the main problem I had with Take Me. Lily remains insecure long after any sensible woman would have figured out that Travis loved her and thought she was a beauty. But I could have stood her insecurity if it wasn’t for that fact that Lily is a prize example of the one thing that is guaranteed to make me despise a character – she jumps to really stupid conclusions without a shred of evidence. For instance, when they are in Tuscany and Lily sees some beautiful dresses in Travis’s luggage she immediately decides that he’s bought them for some unknown Italian woman so she’d have sex with him. When they get home, she sees Travis has received a letter and just knows that it’s a love letter. She does stuff like this all through the book until the end when magically, she comes to her senses after a long internal monologue on her parent’s graves.

Lily is not a virgin and she seemingly has no problems with sex. She has had lovers, she pleasures herself with sex toys in front of Travis, and she makes love with enthusiasm. But every time, right after Lily and Travis make love, she suffers a fit of insecurity, puts on some ugly clothes, and whines about her weight. If a woman so much as compliments Travis or even gives him a look, Lily decides they are having an affair. I lost patience with her very, very quickly.

Travis is nothing but a handsome stud. With no personality to speak of, his change of heart and erotic taste was totally unconvincing. The author puts in a few throwaway lines over his grief about his mother’s death when he was a boy, but that’s about it when it comes to character development. I guess the author had to have someone for Lily to fall in love with and she decided good twin Luke was simply too boring.

Several years ago, I read Justine Davis’s A Whole Lot of Love, a wonderful novel with a plus sized heroine. Layla, the heroine, had her insecurities, but she was realistic and acted like a sensible woman. The hero, Ethan had all the character that Travis lacked, and while not burning, the book featured nice, hot love scenes. If you want to read burning hot sex scenes, Take Me will fill the bill, but beyond that it offers nothing.